Wednesday, June 3, 2009

When you think of the word 'nature' what comes to mind? Plants, animals, bodies of water, right? Nature is the natural physical world around us. If nature is natural, and nature has gay animals, doesn't that necessitate that homosexuality is natural and very much a part of nature?

Two homosexual penguins have successfully hatched an egg that was rejected by its parents and are now proudly rearing the chick, the German zoo housing the gay couple says.

“Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their `Easter present’ and began straight away with hatching the egg,” the zoo in Bremerhaven in northern Germany said on Wednesday.

“Since the chick arrived they are behaving in the same way as one would expect a heterosexual couple to do. Both happy fathers are now diligently handling the everyday care … of their adopted offspring,” the zoo said.

Z and Vielpunkt are part of a six-strong gay community among the zoo’s collection of endangered Humboldt penguins who rose to fame in 2005 when four Swedish females were brought in an unsuccessful attempt to “cure” them.

“Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals,” the zoo said on Wednesday. “Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction.”

The Humboldt penguin is normally found on the coast of Chile and Peru, but numbers have dropped to between 12,000 and 20,000 as industrial fishing methods have led to dwindling stocks of the anchovies on which they feed (Sydney Morning Herald).

Best of luck to the new family, may opponents of LGBT rights see that this is another chip in their argument that homosexuality is not natural. May they also see that children need loving parents to thrive, the gender of the parent(s) is irrelevant.

Don't forget the gay animal exhibit in Oslo. It's so utterly common for animals to have gay or bisexual members in any sexual species that we'd be a downright outlier if we didn't have any natural queers in our species.

Of course, I don't imagine this will change things. I imagine when this argument fully breaks down, they'll shift back to the middle ages standby of "oh, but we prove ourselves better than the animals by what we don't do." Feh.

cerberus - i love that exhibit in Oslo even though I only saw bits of it online. But you are right opponents will just use the old lines of some animals also engage in infanticide and eat their poop and say that humans shouldnt follow animals.

The same zoo once treated the gay penguins quite oppressively, trying to break them up and import girl penguins to "straighten them up." I wrote an article about it--you can see it here. So there's another heartening lesson--people's minds can be changed.

Love this story. It just waves two fingers up at all the nonsense you tend to hear from right-wing groups.

Forgetting the gay aspect for a second, the idea that all animals (us included) only have sex and are in relationships for reproductive purposes is clearly nonsense if you just stop and look at reality. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary just looking at our bonobo cousins. Why some human animals persist in this theory when its clear many creatures thrive from mutual affection, irrespective of gender, is a crying shame.

LGBT people, of whatever species, are a wonderful expression of the variety of life on this planet. Go penguins.